On the night of December 1, a waxed crescent moon was reported to have formed a smiley-face in the Thai sky, with Jupiter and Venus as its eyes. In a country whose leaders regularly consult astrologers and numerologists, that celestial smiley-face seemed auspicious to many after the following morning's events, when the constitutional court disbanded the ruling People's Power Party (PPP) and two of its coalition allies on charges of electoral fraud, leading to the resignation of the prime minister, Somchai Wongsawat, and an end to the eight-day siege of Bangkok's airports by the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD). The crisis at the airports may be over but the political crisis in the country deepens; and it is a measure of its seeming intractability that some in Thailand looked heavenward for signs of relief.

The PAD and their allies have now forced from office three democratically-elected governments in two years. There is little to suggest that this will be the last. Should fugitive former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra's allies re-constitute to form another ruling coalition under different party names (and all indications suggest that they will), the PAD and their armed security force will take to the streets again. Their leaders have promised as much.

"The PAD will return if another proxy government is formed or anyone tries to amend the constitution or the law to whitewash some politicians or to subdue the monarch's royal authority," Sondhi Limthongkul, one of the PAD's leaders, said on Tuesday, capturing succinctly the tensions and anxieties fuelling this crisis.

This has never been an argument over the identity of the nation's political leader. It is an argument over the political identity of the nation. While the constitutional court ruling has defused the airport crisis, it has done little to resolve the argument over the country's political future – an argument of words and opinions that threatened this week to become a battle in the streets between Thailand's citizens.

The PAD's criticisms and demands have never been limited to any particular government; they encompass the entire electoral process, with the emergence of Thaksin and his successors serving as primary evidence of its supposed flaws. The PAD seeks a radical restructuring of the country's political system – namely, a parliament composed primarily of appointees. PAD is therefore a misnomer. The protest leader's recommendations are often anti-democratic and anti-popular. Theirs is an autocratic if not occasionally fascist voice in Thailand's nominally democratic wilderness, and many believe that they have managed to rally the military and the palace's support to bolster that voice. When Queen Sirikit attended the funeral of a PAD supporter in October, many in the PAD interpreted her attendance as a tacit endorsement of the movement. (The queen also regularly supports the funerals of policemen and soldiers).

It is the threat to the monarchy's authority in particular that has stirred such passion among the PAD's supporters, inflating Thaksin Shinawatra and his allies into political monsters of Judas-like, practically supernatural proportions. Thaksin, of course, is not the first corrupt politician to take charge of the country, by means fair or foul. Thai history is littered with corrupt leaders, democratically elected or otherwise, and charges of electoral fraud, for which the ruling party has been disbanded – under a constitution written with the 2006 coup leaders' blessing – may be applied liberally to most political parties in the country. But the PAD find in Thaksin's overwhelming popularity among the rural poor, and the cult of personality that gathered around him during his tenure, a threat to the monarchy's authority. They accuse Thaksin and his successors not only of rampant corruption but also of plotting to overthrow the monarchy, a charge which Thaksin and his cronies vehemently deny. Nevertheless, it is the potent combination of both of these accusations, rather than charges of political corruption and nepotism alone, that has allowed the PAD to gather such political strength.

In a country where convictions for lese majeste can result in up to 15 years' imprisonment, claims of antagonism to the monarchy have historically carried enormous social and political power. Accusations of republicanism and lese majeste, for example, led to the mass lynching of leftists students in Bangkok's Sanam Luang by paramilitary groups in 1976; and in early November, a prominent social critic was arrested on similar charges. He remains imprisoned today.

Make no mistake: the charges of corruption against Thaksin and his allies are well-founded. Thaksin's tenure in particular saw not only extraordinary government corruption and cronyism but also unpardonable human rights abuses. This latest legislative conviction, however, merely papers over the PAD's deep royalist anxieties about the monarchy's position in an electoral democracy.

Given all of this, the PAD therefore continues to find fault not only with Thaksin Shinawatra and his allies but also with the rural population that continues to elect them: the movement's leaders have gone so far as to call the rural poor too ignorant and uneducated to vote in the country's best interest. It is class warfare in the guise of political reform. Their seizure of Bangkok's airports was a power-grab for the country's conservative business and royalist elites, and an incendiary rejection of the electoral voices of the rural poor, who have elected Thaksin and his successors repeatedly and overwhelmingly for close to a decade now – and will probably do so again when fresh elections are held early next year.

Little wonder, then, that during the airport seizures red-shirted government supporters gathered in opposition to the yellow-shirted PAD. Shots were exchanged; bombs were thrown; knives and batons were at the ready. There were casualties on both sides. A widely-circulated video filmed on the day of the airport seizures showed a taxi driver being beaten by PAD men and pleading for his life as an assailant held a machete to his throat.

In the northern province of Chiang Mai, a local PAD supporter was dragged from his car, murdered, and beaten post-mortem by a group of red-shirted men. And on the night before the constitutional court's ruling – even as that smiley-face beamed above it all – a grenade thrown by an unknown assailant left one dead and 22 PAD protesters injured at Don Muang Airport.

The PAD may have begun as a movement to displace Thaksin and his allies, but its discourse – which often conflates the dangerous effectiveness of a corrupt political machine with the purported ineffectiveness of the rural poor's electoral intelligence – has created an enemy far larger and more difficult to contend with. Politicians may be exiled, banned, and disfranchised; populations, however, rarely do so without a fight. The PAD has won its self-proclaimed "final battle" against Somchai's government this week, but it may have also exacerbated the war.

The tourists can now go home. But many of Thailand's citizens – clad in neither red nor yellow – may no longer be able to, regardless of any signs or wonders in the sky.